The finding "officially kicks off a new field: Martian seismology!," said Bruce Banerdt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

NASA said this is the first trembling that appears to have come from inside the planet, as opposed to being caused by forces above the surface, such as wind.

The sound was detected by NASA's Insight Lander, a robot spacecraft that's now sitting on the Martian surface. The sound was detected on April 6, 2019.

Three distinct kinds of sounds can be heard, all of them detected as ground vibrations by the spacecraft's seismometer: noise from Martian wind, the quake itself, and the spacecraft's robotic arm as it moves to take pictures.

An artist's rendering made available by NASA shows an illustration of NASA's InSight lander probing the "Inner Space" of Mars. The InSight, a lander dedicated to studying the deep interior of the planet, is the first mission ever to do so. (Photo: NASA via EPA-EFE)

InSight heard the "marsquake" using a French-built instrument that contains three extremely sensitive seismometers nestled inside a dome to protect them from the wind, Nature magazine said.

“We’ve been waiting months for a signal like this,” said French seismologist Philippe Lognonné. "“It's so exciting to finally have proof that Mars is still seismically active."

Science magazine reported that the quake is so tiny that it would never be detected on Earth amid the background sounds of waves and wind.

As InSight’s two-year mission continues, larger quakes will likely be discovered, Lognonné said. “We’re starting to have many small quakes,” he said. By the end of the mission, he told Science, “we’ll have a super big quake.”

This is not the first quake detected away from Earth: NASA’s Apollo astronauts installed five seismometers that measured thousands of quakes while operating on the moon between 1969 and 1977.